Reinventing a Post-Colonial Congress

The Congress’s three-day brainstorming conclave – chintan shivir – in Jaipur from January 18-20 couldn’t have been better timed. The political crisis in Jharkhand presents new possibilities. Meanwhile, nine other states go to the polls in 2013: Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Chhattisgarh, Delhi, Karnataka, Meghalaya, Tripura, Nagaland and Mizoram. The outcome in Congress-ruled Rajasthan and Delhi and BJP-governed Karnataka could provide early clues to the 2014 general election.

A bruising budget session meanwhile looms. Finance Minister P.Chidambaram will have to defer around Rs. 50,000 crore of Plan expenditure to beyond April 1, 2013 in order to keep the fiscal deficit below 5.5% of GDP. Instructions to cut or defer expenses have already gone out to every union ministry. But the Congress’s real problem is not economics; it is politics. The precise timing of the 16th Lok Sabha election will be decided by Mulayam Singh Yadav and Mayawati without whose support the UPA government would fall.

At the Jaipur chintan shivir, UPA Chairperson Sonia Gandhi confronts three problems but has solutions to only two. The first problem is the choice of the UPA’s prime ministerial candidate in 2014. If the Congress wins more than 170 seats, the answer is Rahul Gandhi. If it doesn’t, the answer becomes more complicated. The focus will turn to finding an interim CEO for the party to replace Dr. Manmohan Singh who will be 82 years old in September 2014.

Dr. Singh was leader of the Opposition in the Rajya Sabha between 1998 and 2004 before being elevated to the prime ministership. Mrs. Gandhi may have to pick one from among her senior ministers for a similar role if the Congress can’t form a government in 2014 and it is necessary to sequester Rahul from long-term electoral damage. The chintan shivir will give us a good idea who that CEO could be: the reliable if colourless Defence Minister A.K. Antony, the ambitious and controversial P. Chidambaram, or a dark horse like External Affairs Minister Salman Khurshid.

Mrs. Gandhi’s second problem is rebuilding the party organisation in the states from the grassroots. Of the key state assembly elections scheduled to be held in 2013, the Congress is likely to do badly in all except Karnataka where B.S.Yeddyurupa’s breakaway Karnataka Janata Party (KJP) and the JD(S) could create a hung assembly. The BJP faces a rout and the Congress, though lacking a charismatic local leader, may be able to stitch together a coalition government.

Mrs. Gandhi’s third problem is public perception. The UPA is widely regarded as corrupt. It is held responsible for inflation. It has presided over an economic slowdown. And it has encouraged the worst excesses of crony capitalism. The game-changer Direct Benefit Transfer (DBT) scheme will provide balm but is not the surgery the Congress needs to redeem public trust.

In 1947, Mahatma Gandhi, freedom achieved, wanted to disband the Congress and form new political organisations to contest free elections. Sardar Vallabhai Patel agreed. Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru did not. Nehru’s view prevailed. In 1969, Indira Gandhi split the Congress to sideline the syndicate of regional satraps led by K.Kamaraj and S.Nijalingappa. The organisational and state-level decline of the Congress began in 1969 though Mrs. Gandhi’s 1971 election victory and the euphoria over the Bangladesh war disguised it for nearly a decade.

Nehru inherited a colonial administration. After independence, it continued to serve the government in power. Colonial laws had been written to often protect British injustice, not deliver justice to Indians. Many remain cast in stone 150 years later, delaying and denying justice to ordinary Indians. Yet, Nehru did not impose chief ministers on states. The party’s local organisation was given a relatively free hand to choose regional leaders. Indira Gandhi reversed that policy. She imposed state chief ministers, suspended intra-Congress elections, dismissed opposition state governments under Article 356, and undermined the judiciary.

The important lesson for Sonia Gandhi to absorb at the chintan shivir in Jaipur is to not follow her mother-in-law’s autocratic policies and hew instead to Nehru’s liberal, transparent leadership. Nehru made many errors: Jammu & Kashmir, China, and even sowing the seeds of dynasty by appointing members of his family to high office – from Indira to sister Vijaylakshmi Pandit. The last thing the battered Congress needs is to emulate Nehru’s few missteps and ignore the many excellent examples of governance he set.

In 1998, Sonia Gandhi took charge of a party fraying at the edges. Fifteen years later, having become the longest-serving president in Congress history, the party’s edges have frayed further. In 1999, the Congress won 114 seats in the Lok Sabha, the lowest in its history. To avoid falling below that in 2014, Mrs. Gandhi has to solve the leadership problem, strengthen the organisation at the grassroots in the states, and restore public confidence.

With its vast army of workers and an overflowing party treasury, the Congress remains a formidable force. It has been underestimated before – in 1980 and again in 2004 – when it was supposed to lose the general election but didn’t. It can resolve its first two problems – leadership and reorganising the states – with the right strategies. The third – public perception – may prove more intractable. On that could rest its fate in 2014.

Author

Minhaz Merchant is an author, editor, columnist and publisher. A recipient of the Lady Jeejeebhoy prize for physics, his books include biographies of former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi and the late industrialist Aditya Birla. After three years with The Times of India and a year with India Today, he founded, at 25, Sterling Newspapers Pvt. Ltd., a pioneering publisher of six specialised journals, including Gentleman, a political and literary monthly (whose senior editors and columnists included David Davidar, Shashi Tharoor, L.K. Advani and Dom Moraes), and Business Computer, in technical collaboration with Dutch media group VNU (renamed The Nielsen Company in 2007). Minhaz is chairman and group editor-in-chief of Merchant Media Ltd. and founding-editor of Innovate, a magazine for US-based CEOs. He heads the group’s think-tank, Global Intelligence Review. Having played tournament-level cricket and tennis – and rhythm guitar for his school rock band – he likes Dire Straits, R.E.M. and Sachin Tendulkar’s straight drives in roughly reverse order.
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Minhaz Merchant is an author, editor, columnist and publisher. A recipient of the Lady Jeejeebhoy prize for physics, his books include biographies of former. . .